Missing People, website design with empathy
Designing for people at a heightened emotional state and impacted by a missing loved one.
Challenge
Missing People is a lifeline to an estimated one million people affected by disappearance every year.
For the Missing People website design project, the ambition was to double the number of people they reached over a three year period to ensure they provide maximum help to those in need and to inspire people to support the cause. We worked together to understand how the Missing People website could be improved to support this ambition.
The solution
Missing People’s existing website had served the charity well but had become inconsistent and outdated and was no longer meeting the needs of the users or the organisation. We started with a deep dive into understanding the experience and needs of people affected by missing, and how Missing People’s experts support that experience.
Close collaboration through workshops, surveys and group interviews helped us understand users and experts so we could put their needs at the heart of every decision related to improving the website experience. We co-created our solution with families of missing people and user tested key features to ensure our recommendations met the needs of the audiences.
While we focused on usability and users, we also looked at how we can apply the latest and best practice technical and SEO conventions to the website to ensure it is optimised for search engines. SEO also helps people find the content they need easily and the organic performance of charity websites is essential to driving long term sustainable traffic and engagement. This is how the website redesign project could help Missing People to double the number of people it reaches within three years.
Website analytics also suggested there were opportunities to increase engagement within donation journeys to improve conversion. We used compelling storytelling and intuitive sign-posting to inspire website visitors to support the cause.
With the information and insight we were gaining from families and front line helpers, we developed an ‘emotion map’ to fully understand who was involved when a person goes missing. This allowed us to understand what each audience’s emotional state would be at the diverse stages of missing. This made it possible to design sections of the site in a specific way to maximise usability for the required user need at any given moment.
The charity website project involved user experience and user interface design, it is built on WordPress and includes complex technical integrations. Through our optimisation services, we have been able to improve and maintain the experience since launch.
We decided to completely overhaul our site, which had become unmanageable and was never designed with our users in mind. It was a challenging but overall enjoyable experience thanks to Pixeled Eggs’ patience, logical thinking and expertise. We were very impressed with how quickly they got to grips with the complexities of our work, the huge volume of content we needed to structure, and the way in which they sensitively engaged with our beneficiaries.”
Georgia Romeril, Senior Marketing Manager, Missing People
Results
The new website significantly improved key performance areas, helping Missing People reach a wider audience and provide better support to those in need.
Overall, the site has become more discoverable, with enhancements in speed and performance that led to improved organic search results.
Designing with user-insights and emapthy allowed us to maxamise usability and improve the overall user experience. As visitor levels rose, awareness for the charity increased, alongside a more engaging experience this ultimately led to a boost in donations for the charity.
38% Google search result position improvement.
36% improvement in click through rates.
17% increase in users from organic search.
15.5% page speed improvement.
Doubled views to the donations page and section.
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